Dear Superstar: Chrissie Hynde

On one of the Pretenders’ biggest hits, Chrissie Hynde avowed that “in the middle of the road, you see the darndest things.” True enough—right now, what you would see there is a 57-year-old new-wave icon with no apparent fear of death.

It’s a Tuesday afternoon in late August, and Hynde wants to show off a massive Native American canoe that her hometown, Akron, Ohio, has preserved as a monument to its ancient history. Trouble is, she needs to walk—or in this supercharged rail-thin vegan’s case, strut—across a busy expressway on-ramp to get to the grass island where the boat has been placed.

“Let ’em fuckin’ kill me; I’m ready to go,” she proclaims, leaping Frogger-style into a phalanx of confused motorists. “No one walks in America. When I walk around downtown at night, people think I’m a prostitute.”

Hynde, who’s wearing a T-shirt  emblazoned with the phrase AKRON: WHERE THE WEAK ARE KILLED AND EATEN, has always lived a little dangerously. In 1973, she fled the Rubber City for London, where she worked as a rock critic, partied with the Sex Pistols, rehearsed with an embryonic version of the Clash and became BFFs with Iggy Pop, before founding the Pretenders in 1978. Her tough-but-sweet songs and androgynous look made her a pop star and a feminist icon (two designations she hates). And if the Pretenders’ more recent rootsy records aren’t designed to register in the world of Coldplay and Kanye, it doesn’t seem to worry Hynde. “I got into rock & roll because I was a fan,” she says. “I never cared about celebrity.”

These days, her artistic endeavor, almost rivaling her band, is Akron itself. She’s become a civic booster for a hollowed-out post-industrial burg that’s trying to rebound. She opened a vegan restaurant with a chic-for-Ohio modernist look, joined a campaign to save endangered local bus lines and hopes to turn the crummy movie theater into a thriving art house. Akron is all over the Pretenders’ new album, Break Up the Concrete.

Driving around in her fuel-efficient Korean car, she pulls up in front of the rare house that isn’t run-down or boarded up—porch freshly painted, flower beds lovingly tended. Chrissie Hynde wells up with pride like she’s president of the Village Green Preservation Society: “Look! See what can happen if you care enough to do something?!”

Before you started the Pretenders, you worked as a music critic in England. What’s the meanest thing you ever wrote?
Beardpop, Huntington, NY

I said that it sounded like Al Green was choking on a chicken bone at the end of “Let’s Get Married.” I must’ve had a problem with marriage at the time, because he’s one of my all-time favorite singers. I’m ashamed to admit I wrote that. But you asked. Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.

You grew up a rock chick in northern Ohio. What was a typical Friday night?
Nemkin, Akron, OH
Go to Cleveland to see a band. Maybe Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels would be playing at, like, a fun fair—Chippewa Lake Park Appreciation Day.